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The Walking Dead Recap, ‘The Grove’

‘The Walking Dead‘ delivered a hard punch to the gut with this episode which focused on Carol, Tyreese and the children. It’s been interesting to see how everyone that survived the showdown at the prison has been desperately trying to find each other, and this place called Terminus. Though i’m anxious for everyone to reunite, it’s important to show how the struggle of surviving affects the characters and especially the kids.

Lizzie and Mika are two of the oddest, and most frustrating, characters the show has had, so far. While Carl, slowly, adjusted to having to be a protector for himself and his family, these two decided to continued to live their little care free lives as if there weren’t dead people walking around everywhere. One of the first things we learned about Lizze from her own sister is that she was a little messed up. We’re never going to learn what happened to her pre-apocalypse, but her dramatic reaction to Carol killing a walker she was playing with was pretty telling. The pseudo family finds a house and is comfortable for a bit until the girls almost get eaten after Mika finds her sister feeding one walker that fell through the train tracks. I think most of us had figured out that she was the one feeding the walkers at the prison, but this was a confirmation. Liz doesn’t see the walkers as flesh eating zombies, they’re just her rat eating friends!

There was an odd dynamic between the two, with Mika sometimes being the wiser sister, and realizing that in order to survive she needs to fight. Although she handled her gun pretty well against some charred walkers, she was no match for her sister. Returning from the woods, Tyreese and Carol find Lizzie standing over her sister’s body with a bloody knife. She reasons that Mika will eventually turn and she’ll have another zombie to play with, but that leaves Carol with the terrible job of having to kill Mika when she does come back. Carol and Tyreese weigh their options, neither feeling comfortable with having Lizzie under the same roof with baby Judith. So Carol literally takes her out to pasture and shoots her in the head, then they bury the girls next to each other in the front yard of the house.

One of the lingering questions of the season is what would Tyreese do when he found out that Carol killed his girlfriend Karen and David. She confesses and says that he can do what he wants. It seems, for a moment, that he might go into hysterics and attack her or something, but he simply forgives her. They set off down the tracks again, most likely towards Terminus, and now we wait to see what Carol and Rick’s reunion will be like, and how he’ll react to seeing Judith again. In retrospect, it was a little weird for all of us to be rooting for Carol to kill these kids, but it kind of had to happen. I got nervous every time I realized that they were alone with the baby. Carol asks Tyreese if he noticed how they are with the walkers, knowing that it would become harder to keep them safe if they screamed or ran away whenever walkers were near. She desperately tried to get it into their little heads that they had to fight, because she didn’t want what happened to her daughter Sophia to happen to them.

So this was a pretty heavy episode, but there was also some fine acting, especially between Brighton Sharpino and Kyla Kenedy who played Lizzie and Mika. As we grow closer to the finale, i’m hoping for a bit more action, and to hopefully get a glimpse of this Terminus place.